Untethered
Charlène Wartelle-Sentenero
Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp
My practice explores the way female-coded bodily phenomena function as ornamentations and how they have shaped the ways women are read, classified, and regulated. Moving from internal occurrences to external manifestations, each piece investigates a different site where gendered expectations are projected onto the body. These somatic realities become markers through which identity, power, and social norms are negotiated. By working with steel, a material historically connected to armor, industry, and masculine environments, I transpose feminine signs into structures of both protection and confrontation emphasizing duality as one. The resulting pieces emerge from the lived experience of inhabiting a woman’s body, reclaiming ornament as a vital carrier of meaning. This project aims to challenge the assumptions attached to womanhood and exposes how deeply embedded cultural narratives continue to shape our understanding of the self. Here, I seek to transform these inherited constructions into forms of agency while inviting both wearer and viewer to question the beliefs through which femininity is perceived and interpreted.